Nu-ILB: What books have you purchased lately?

All of Mishima's books have something for me, even the ones that don't add up to much. My personal favourite is Sun and Steel (an essay of his).

There are SO MANY I haven't read, pretty much all the recently translated stuff. I need to catch up but I typically just re-read and re-read him

Sorry, what recently translated stuff?

a '66 paperback of The Diary of Vaslav Nijinsky
have tried to think where I was reading references to the book. Does Colin Wilson reference it somewere in the Outsider or something, or does it turn up in Morning of the Magicians or something of that ilk?
anyway cost €2 and binding looks pretty together.

and Theosophy by Rudolf Steiner. Hadn't realised he was connected to Blavatsky at all. Haven't read the book yet so don't know if he twisted the teachings at all. Thought he was supposed to be a philanthropist of sorts and not sure to what extent the Theosophy society was conventionally philanthropic. Thought it might actually be more mysanthropic to large sections of society, but been a while since i read much about them.

Sister Noon by Karen Joy Fowler, best known for The Jane Austen Book Club, which I haven't read. Have enjoyed Fowler's science fiction short stories, and most of her novel Sarah Canary, though it alternates frontier sightings of the diverting, anomalous title character with real solid chunks of historical commentary, tending to the lecture-y. This one is about a good daughter of old San Francisco, whose life is complicated by encounters with the historical entity previously known to me as Mammy Pleasant, though she had other names, other roles besides madam. Blurbs indcate she's a deftly flickering, flowering Fowlerian subject.

Just got this
http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1312050000l/1403416.jpg

that is not a good cover

Tons o' recent back issues of THE PARIS REVIEW, each a buck a piece. So those'll keep me occupied.

I trip on their online interview archive. Writers are soooo into being interviewed, getting away from the desk; for PR anyway. What's wrong with the cover, Ornamental Cabbage?

Every interview intro reads like "This interview is composed of eight sessions which took place over fifteen months..."

It looks like a Harlequin erotic novel, but with extra horrible type on the blurb quotes, and the Series of Unfortunate Events font for the title/author. Very mixed messages//slapped together. Nice bum, though.

Two by Blaise Cendrars - Gold and The Astonished Man (love Peter Owen)
Pavese - The Leather Jacket
Denton Welch - I Left my Grandfather's House

The Street Of Crocodiles And Other Stories by Bruno Schulz - Penguin Classics edition! Feels/looks swank. Should arguably be named Sanatorium Under The Sign Of The Hourglass And Other Stories, but can't quibble.

stopped in my two fave stores near me. grey matter and meeting house books. they are such great stores. seriously, i can't say it enough, grey matter is REALLY worth a trip if you are near boston or even new york. this is my last buying trip for a while. will not buy anything else for myself this year. i have so much stuff at home stacked up.

clifford d. simak - time & again

samuel r. delany - the ballad of beta 2

jack vance - to live forever

jack vance - emphyrio

robert silverberg - the masks of time

robert silverberg - tower of glass

rudy rucker - wetware

rudy rucker - master of space and time

james tiptree, jr - up the walls of the world

theodore sturgeon - to marry medusa

james timptree, jr - star songs of an old primate

thomas m. disch - on wings of song

thomas m. disch - echo round his bones

theodore sturgeon - the synthetic man

kate wilhelm - city of cain

kate wilhelm - the killer thing

kate wilhelm - the clewiston test

patricia highsmith - plotting and writing suspense fiction

reinhold millers - time exile

kim stanley robinson - the wild shore (book one of three californias trilogy)

I just went to the actual place so I bought Pamuk's 'Museum of Innocence'.

Read The Clewiston Test recently: quite good, if low-key.

I could never get properly on board with Rudy Rucker. Read his Ware trilogy years ago. Lots of inventive ideas, but REALLY shoddy prose.

Never had a prob w Rucker; so I have no taste, but/and really enjoyed The Wild Shore. Seemed caught up in the wide- and sharp-eyed urgency of Huckleberry Finn, which no writer should think about inviting comparisons to, but Robinson makes it work. Also kind of Twain x London, re Man in/vs. Nature.

The Line Of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst
The Everlasting Story Of Nory by Nicholson Baker
Ten Thousand Things by Maria Dermout
My Ears Are Bent by Joseph Mitchell

As a birthday gift:

My Vocabulary Did This To Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer. I've had my eye on this for almost half a year, but I am a cheapskate.

The Long Ships is a Kindle Daily Deal today, maybe will get that. Oh wait, do we post ebooks on this thread?

An ebook meets the basic requirement of being a book.

Dow, you have taste! And you're spot-on about The Wild Shore. I really need to get and read the other two books in that sort-of-trilogy

GOt the Pete Townshend autobio last week, not looked far into it and still have a couple of books to finish before i start it.
I was half thinking of buying a William Kennedy omnibus in another shop but wound up not. Pages were a bit yellowed, been meaning to read some of him since the film of Ironweed came out. I know I did get through one of his at some time back then and meant to read more, probably was one of the titles in the omnibus, but this is now 20 or more years later.

xpost Thanks Ornamental, yeah, I've got some kind of taste, whatever it is. Right now,I too need to read the other two, Gold Coast and Pacific Rim(both which I've got)in that sort-of trilogy, plus the more recent 40 Drops of Rain (also got) and its two similarly titled follow-ups--and his new 3032 (think that's the title). In other words, I have a taste for following this theme of man screwing with Nature (thus himself as well). So just got Jon Krauker's non-fiction Into Thin Air, about a disastrously vainglorious Everest expedition. Krakauer was one of the climbers, less gullible than some, but how much less, if he was there at all? He prob asks himself that too; not one of your more pompous reporters. Really liked his unpretentious speculations and humane journo-surgical skill re the elusive, somewhat Thoreau-wannabbe tracked in Into The Wild (also a really fine movie, directed by Sean Penn).

Jon Krakauer, that is! Also will read his book on the Pat Tillman case, with the rugged terrain as actual factor and alibi (though several layers of the cover-up were constructed in the Pentagon)

A doctor appointment took me within a few blocks of Powell's Books. This can be fatal.

The Elder Edda, tr. Andy Orchard, a new Penguin classic paperback, $15.
A, Louis Zukofsky, New Directions trade paperback, new, $25.
Rome and Italy, Livy, used Penguin classic paperback, $7.

I've got that Krakauer short book 'Three Cups of Deceit' which I keep meaning to read

The Elder Edda, tr. Andy Orchard, a new Penguin classic paperback, $15.

weird thing for them to bring out! apparently it's been delayed for like ten years. what's it like - ? have you read the one in OUP at all?

I have not read the OUP edition of the Elder Edda. What's it like?

Oh, I see you asked first. The Orchard translation appears to be a fairly freehand poetic interpretation. Here's a sample taken at random (p110):

13. 'Tell me this, All-wise, since, dwarf, I suspect
you know every creature's whole history:
what the moon is called that people see
in every world there is.'

14. ' "Moon" it's called by men, but "gloe-ball" by the gods,
they call it "spinning wheel" in Hel;
"speeder" giants, "shining" dwarfs,
the leves call it "tally of years".'

damn typos:
line 5 glow-ball,
line 8 elves

that seems a little more naturalistic than i remember the er larrington being, which is the one that's in world's classics -- i recall it having a sort of half-translated feel, lots of nouns and syntax kept, which kind of suited the material somehow still. i don't know, i don't remember it particularly well -- i just remember riddling-matches and the sorts of details everyone remembers (ship made of dead men's fingernails e.g.) and never really understanding the time-frame of the voluspa

The Dog Of The South by Charles Portis
Dream Time by Geoffrey O'Brien

The Portis, after I finish this Hollinghurst, is coming next next next.

t Aimless: you're in for a treat w/ the Spicer -- I picked it up a few months ago & still feel like i've barely scratched the surface of its myriad delights

Boualem Sansal - "An Unfinished Business"
Nassim Nicholas Taleb - "Fooled By Randomness"

/The Dog Of The South/ by Charles Portis
/Dream Time/ by Geoffrey O'Brien

Thanks!

'Nother one:

Monkey by Wu Ch'eng-en (but maybe not), trans. by Arthur Waley - already own this; buying another copy for a friend on his birthday.

The nature of Monkey was irrepresible

Popped into the Gower St Waterstones on my lunchbreak today, they've got a half price sale on all their second hand stuff. literally two minutes of browsing the fiction section netted me the following for £2 each:

Flann O'Brien - The Third Policeman (been meaning to read this for ages. please tell me it's funny.)
Alan Heathcock - Volt (oddly enough I saw this mentioned on a 'eleven new american readers you must read' list last night and felt sad that i'd probably never get to read it (it's a collection of short stories about a stoic midwestern rural community with mccarthy style biblical darkness going on etc) so finding it there today was a real treat.
Jesmyn Ward - Salvage the Bones (this is for the MA. Looks interesting enough)

Then got a bus back to New Cross and picked up DeLillo's Underworld for TWENTY PENCE!!!

It's very funny

If you have to ask you'll never know

got a pile of books in yesterday, 2 from amazon and 6 from a charity book sale at work.

Chinua Achebe - No Longer at Ease ($1)
Arthur Miller - An Enemy of the People ($1)
Kurt Vonnegut (Sirens of Titan, Breakfast of Champions, Slaughterhouse 5 - hardcovers, $1 each)
Jon Krakauer - Into Thin Air
Miles Davis - Miles (this is great so far, btw)
Ursula K Le Guin - Earthsea Trilogy

Lovely new indie bookstore just opened up here, so I bought secondhand hardcover copies of

On Michael Jackson - Margo Jefferson (already read, awesome)
Amnesia Moon - Jonathan Lethem (one of the few Lethems I haven't read yet)

I was buying another item on Amazon as a gift to my daughter and threw in for myself:

Complete Poems, Basil Bunting, new trade paperback, New Directions, for a bit under $13. This edition includes Briggflatts and a fair number of Uncollected Poems as back matter.

In related news, I now officially own too many books. Sumpthin's gotta give.

I got a Selected? Collected? recently on holiday. Enjoyed Briggflats very much - bleak. Love and poetry carved out of an inhospitable environment.

I sold books today, maybe six or seven out of the dozen or so I took to Powell's Books. In return, I bought:

The Recognitions, Wm. Gaddis, as a new Dalkey Archive trade paperback, for $19. I can't say I thought the typesetting was especially attractive on this one, but it looks like a good read. Maybe this spring.

The Gallic Wars, Julius Caesar, in a used Penguin paperback. I read this ages ago in college and just recently have been reading his Civil War, so I bought the companion volume for $7.50.

Crossing The Empty Quarter by Carol Swain
The Skating Rink by Roberto Bolano

Thomas Disc, The Man Who Had No Idea Stories. Never saw it before, anybody read it?

whoa I bought The Recognitions today, along with JR